A mechanical face seal, which may be employed, for example, in a dishwasher pump, may include a stationary seal head assembly that mates with, and seals against, a rotating seal seat assembly. Typically, the seal seat assembly mounts to an impeller that is driven via a shaft by a motor. It is common for the impeller to be made of a plastic material. Such a conventional face seal assembly performs very well at sealing out water, and prevents the impeller from overheating because the water adjacent to the seal absorbs frictional heat generated by the seal. A rubber bellows or boot of the seal head assembly provides an axially flexible sealing membrane between the seal ring and the pump housing. A spring biases the seal ring against the seal seat. A concern with these conventional face seals is that a vibrating seal ring can emit annoying, loud seal squealing, squeaking, ringing, chirping, or moaning noises, especially sealing water-based fluids at elevated temperatures or under marginal lubrication.
Thus, it is desirable to have a face seal for a rotating shaft that will adequately seal water, and can also significantly reduce the vibration of the seal ring to prevent annoying, loud noises from being generated.
Accordingly, the present disclosure provides the rubber bellows or boot-type mechanical face seal with a constriction ring that constricts the normal outward bulging of the flex section of the rubber boot as it folds and tries to roll forward over itself during axial deflection. This constriction causes increased frictional hysteresis during compression and decompression of the boot flex section. The increased hysteresis, defined as the difference between the load/deflection curve resulting from axially compressing the seal from its free height to near its solid height and the load/deflection curve resulting from releasing the seal from near its solid height to its free height, increases the dampening capacity of the seal design four to six fold, or more, compared to conventional non-constricted designs. The increased dampening action suppresses high frequency frictional stick-slip vibrations between the rotating and stationary rubbing seal components, thus suppressing high frequency vibrations of the seal ring to prevent annoying noise generation.
Further areas of applicability of the present disclosure will become apparent from the detailed description provided hereinafter. It should be understood that the detailed description and specific examples are intended for purposes of illustration only and are not intended to limit the scope of the disclosure.